BBC NEWS | Europe | Riefenstahl race-hate charges dropped (original) (raw)

German prosecutors have decided not to press race-hate charges against filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl because of lack of evidence.

Investigators began their inquiry after Ms Riefenstahl was accused by German gypsies' association Rom of lying about the fate of more than 100 gypsies, who were taken from the Salzburg and Berlin concentration camps between 1940 and 1942 to be used as extras in her films.

Ms Riefenstahl, best known for the films she made during the Nazi era under Adolf Hitler, said in an interview that the gypsies, used in her 1942 film Tiefland, or Lowland, all survived the war.

"We saw all the gypsies that played in Lowlands again after the war," she told Frankfurt's Rundschau newspaper.

"Nothing happened to them."

Nazi involvement denied

However Rom said that many of them in fact were returned to the death camps, where they were subsequently killed.

Around 500,000 gypsies were murdered by the Nazis

Ms Riefenstahl has subsequently apologised, releasing a statement in which she said she deplored the treatment of gypsies under the Nazi regime.

She also promised not to repeat the comments.

In turn the Frankfurt prosecutors' office said that there was little interest in pursuing a case against the filmmaker, who turned 100 in August this year, due to her advanced age.

Ms Riefenstahl, whose work included the Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will, about the 1934 Nazi Party Nuremberg Rally and Olympia, glorifying the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, has twice been cleared of complicity with the Nazis by war crimes courts following the collapse of the Nazi regime at the end of World War II.

She has always denied political involvement with the party and was never an official member, although she admitted to being an admirer of Hitler.

Following the end of the war she was sentenced to four years in prison for her role in perpetrating Nazi propaganda.

In total around 500,000 gypsies, in addition to six million Jews, were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.